Just Feed XKCD to the Digg Front Page and get it over with

The often brilliant webcomic XKCD is published on particular days and at particular times during the week. The clockwork nature of the posts is followed by several Digg users because every post will hit the front page. The chances of a Kevin Rose submission missing the front page is higher than the chances of XKCD missing.

As a result, every post is submitted multiple times within seconds after it goes live. Because Digg does not “lock out” submissions once they are started, everyone who starts submitting before the first one is completed will be able to continue their submission.

Once submitted, the real work begins. With the multiple submissions, the race to get it to the front page requires the submitter to accumulate as many Diggs as possible in a short time.

Other sites like Cracked and APOD pose similar dilemmas. They are also published at specified times, are normally submitted by multiple people, and will most likely hit the front page at least once.

If we can assume that the quality of the content on these three sites will be high (as it normally is) and they are going to hit the front page of Digg (as they normally do), why not just feed them directly to the front page as soon as they’re published?

In reality, Digg would never do such a thing. In reality, they couldn’t and shouldn’t as it would hurt the integrity of the site.

In reality, Digg should:

Fix the dupe filter (which, to their credit, they say they’re working on)

Figure out a way to lock out duplicate submissions from the same URL

It doesn’t seem hard to implement a lock out feature. Even if multiple users start a submission, once the first person “swears it’s original” and posts it, the others should not be able to submit. “Sorry, too late, someone just submitted it.”

Of course, if they do it, the race to submit those sites would be that much more interesting.

8 thoughts on “Just Feed XKCD to the Digg Front Page and get it over with”

In reality, people who like seeing the content from these sites (i.e. the people who digg these stories every day) should put them in their RSS reader/bookmarks and just visit the sites each day and stop cluttering up the front page of digg already!

You have a low standard for brilliance. XKCD has never made me smirk, smile, groan, chuckle, giggle, laugh, chortle or guffaw.

XKCD is not funny at all to anyone outside of the programming industry. Let’s face facts. Programmers are not normal people. Programmers do not understand normal people (though they are all convinced that they do) and normal people do not understand programmers. So it offends me when I see XKCD sycophant programmers claiming that XKCD needs to be made mainstream. XKCD may be funny to you, but you are not normal, and XKCD humour seems to be built on in jokes… like the KKK had in jokes that were only funny to other bigots.

XKCD, I want those hours of my life back. I could have done something more productive with those hours. Like wiping my arse with a hedgehog.

The dupe problem could be fixed so easily. If the problem is that posts that are started before another is submitted, then simply run the scan for the URL at the end of the submission. Or both at the beginning and the end.

It sucks to have so many people trying to push a post all from the same source, it pushes some good content out of the way, hurting their chances of even coming close to the FP…

I am going to start putting false titles for my subs, include the word XKCD just so 30 to 40 people digg it without checking, same with APOD.

If it became a race to get it out the door first, you would possibly run into the problem of poor titles and/or descriptions. People would just rush through the submission process, and in doing so, wouldn’t fill out the forms properly. I personally don’t mind the multiple submissions all that much, I think there are larger problems with Digg that should be addressed first.

bunny
you seem awfully proud of being too dense to understand something
(I wouldn’t throw ad hominem at you but you already opened yourself to that with your moronic kkk.. joke? was that a joke? maybe the only one who isn’t normal is you. maybe you SHOULD go wipe your ass with a hedgehog. really fast.)